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8 Animals That Love Getting High More Than We Do

Whether it’s a cigarette break after a high-powered business meeting, a cold beer after a hot day on the job or a half-ounce of shroom juice injected directly into the scrotum to ease the stress of writing, people love their intoxicants.

But it turns out that it’s not strictly a human convention. Experts have found that animals also seek out a quick chemical high from plants, bugs and, well, wherever they can find it.

8 Animals That Love Getting High More Than We Do

Elephants

Elephants drugs of choice are liquor and opiates.

Throughout history, elephants have been worshiped as gods, lauded for their wisdom and memory, and made into mascots for the Republican Party. Like people, elephants are very complex, social animals. This means they exhibit a lot of humanlike behavior. They nurture their young, mourn their dead and love to get absolutely fucked up. Seriously.

Drunk Elephant Sex Party

Horses

Horses prefer to get high on potted locoweed, a type of legume that acts as a mind-altering drug.

Apparently locoweed is to horses what nicotine is to people: an extremely addictive drug that kills them slowly over the course of several years. During the lean winter months, locoweed is the only green plant available in some pastures.

Horses first seek it out for its nutritious goodness, but keep coming back for its psychoactive effects.

Bighorn Sheep

Bighorn sheep like to get high on narcotic lichen.

And luckily for them, in the vast wilderness of the Canadian Rockies lives a unique species of yellow-green lichen that will fuck you up.

The lichen is extremely rare (it can take decades for them to grow over a single rock) and only grow in very inhospitable regions of the Rockies. Despite the fact that it is dangerous to get at and contains no nutritional value, the sheep will risk life and limb to get some.

Once they reach the lichen, they will rub their teeth down to the gum line to scrape off every last bit of it – in the process getting super high.

Reindeer

The body does not actually metabolize psychedelic mushrooms, so most of the psychoactive compounds get washed out with the user’s pee. If you collect that urine and drink it, you will trip almost as hard as if you’d eaten the mushrooms yourself.

Many native Alaskan tribes stretch out their supply of mushrooms this way. The priests eat the ‘shrooms and the followers drink their urine. How does this tie into reindeer?

Like most wild herbivores, reindeer have a very firm constitution that allows them to eat all manner of nasty plants and fungi without getting sick. Many strains of hallucinogenic mushrooms are toxic to human beings, but not toxic to reindeer.

Scientists have noted that drunk bees are less likely to fly, less likely to engage in social behavior and prone to random fits of violence.

Some bees get so blitzed that they lose the ability to do anything but lay on their back and kick their fuzzy legs feebly in the air.

Drunk Bees

Jaguars

Jaguars drug of choice is banisteriopsis caapi, a root found in the jungles of South America.

Jaguars love to get high, and their choice in intoxicants is badass. Wild cats looking for a high will seek out the roots of the caapi plant and gnaw on them until they start to hallucinate. It looks even cuter than it sounds.

Jaguar Gets High

Caapi root contains a variety of powerful MAOIs (chemicals like you find in antidepressants), which allow the animal’s brain to be flooded with DMT, causing them to trip balls.

In fact, some scientists believe that humans first learned to use the root by observing jaguars getting high off of it.

Capuchin Monkeys and Lemurs

These two species love to get high on hallucinogenic millipedes.

Yes, both capuchin monkeys in South America and lemurs in Madagascar have learned how to get high off of passing insects. Apparently, several species of millipedes squirt out a poisonous compound when agitated.

By covering themselves with the poison, lemurs and monkeys are able to ward off parasitic insects and get a delightful narcotic buzz.

Unfortunately, millipede venom is also filled with cyanide, which is deadly to pretty much everything.

Of course the risk of agonizing death has never stopped anyone from getting high, so the capuchins (one of mankind’s closest relatives) gather in huge groups and swap hits of ‘pede.

In the jaguar one: The jaguar is actually tripping from the DMT in the Cappi, the MAOIs (monoamine oxidase inhibitors) are what keeps enzymes from breaking up the DMT, thus letting the DMT get to the jaguar’s brain.